Basketball helped Lithuanians survive Soviet gulag

Nerijus Adomaitis

4 Min Read

VILNIUS (Reuters) - Forced labor camps were meant to crush opponents to the regime of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, but basketball helped them to survive, an exhibition in former Soviet state Lithuania shows.

Visitors Zigmas Vitkauskas (L) and Edvardas Brokas observe a picture of the Soviet gulag labour camp basketball team during an exhibition in Vilnius August 24, 2011. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

Around 150,000 Lithuanians were sent to the camps, known as gulags after their Russian acronym, and another 132,000 were deported to live in far-flung parts of the former Soviet empire by 1953. About 50,000 perished due to lack of food, illness, harsh weather and hard labor.

“In a place where everyone was forced to fight for himself, it was necessary to find something that could unite people and preserve their pride. Basketball became such a thing,” said Vilma Juozeviciute, the curator of the exhibition.

The show opened Wednesday at the former headquarters of the feared KGB secret police, which is now a museum, in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

The exhibition has been timed to coincide with Lithuania’s hosting of the European basketball championships, which begin at the end of August.

Pictures displayed on a green wooden wall with a basketball board and a barbed-wire fence on top depict political prisoners and deportees playing basketball or proudly showing their team jerseys with Lithuanian names, such as Zalgiris, now a famous club from Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city.

Some pictures captured fans absorbed by the game and cheering their side, and who, it seems, had forgotten for a moment about their hardships.

“To be able to play basketball at the gulag allowed us to feel human again, not only like a slave, and to survive the captivity,” Juozas Butrimas, 84, told Reuters at the exhibition.

He said he was arrested by the KGB and sent to a forced labor camp in Russia’s coal mining region of Vorkuta above the Arctic Circle in 1945 for being a member of an underground anti-Soviet organization.

Butrimas happened to play basketball at a local team in the town of Panevezys before the KGB arrested him and three other teammates. Two of them never returned, while Butrimas came back to Lithuania 21 years later.

Lithuania this year marks the 70th anniversary of the first Soviet deportations after the Baltic state was occupied by former Soviet forces under a secret pact with Nazi Germany.

Basketball became popular in Lithuania after the small Baltic country won the European basketball championships in 1937 and 1939, when it also hosted the championship.

It will again host the European championship on August 31-September 18, a fact which inspired the runners of the KGB museum to make an exhibition of archive pictures and documents on basketball as a means of survival in the Soviet labor camps.

The first basketball teams appeared in the early 1950s, but they sprang up across the labor camps after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, when restrictions were eased, Juozeviciute said.

Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians and others also teamed up and played the sport in the camps.

“Basketball means so much to me, and I am so proud that we are having this championship here,” said Butrimas.